Traditional power management methods modify a power state of a processor based on a system load, an estimated trend in processor usage, or other heuristic to achieve better performance. For example, the clock speed of the processor may be increased to handle an increase in the system load. On a mobile computing device, the processor typically executes infinite loops for animation, background services, or implementing parallelism. To allow these processes to execute continuously, the traditional power management methods limit, or entirely prevent, the processor from entering an idle state or other low power state even when the device is in standby mode (e.g., the display is off). Thus, the processes rapidly drain the battery while providing little value to a user of the mobile device.